How delocalized are the polyacenes?

In an attempt to quantify electron delocalization in polyacenes with up to 50 carbon atoms, we have performed self-consistent field calculations in which the π electrons are constrained to occupy highly localized molecular orbitals (HILOs) centered on a maximum of two, six or ten adjacent carbon atoms. We have also performed similar calculations on simple polyacene analogs consisting only of hydrogen atoms and exhibiting electron delocalization in the σ framework. We find that the energetic cost of localizing the π electrons in the polyacenes is roughly 60, 5 or 0.1 kJ/mol per ring atom for the two-, six- and ten-atom HILOs, respectively, and the use of these localized models overestimates the predicted hydrogenation energies of the acenes by roughly 50%, 4% and 0.1%, respectively. We conclude that the chemistry of polyacenes can be modeled well using highly localized descriptions of the π electrons.

Economical Models for Electron Densities.

We discuss a new theoretical framework for modeling molecular electron densities. Our approach decomposes the total density into contributions from basis function products and then approximates each product using constrained least-squares approximation in a tailored local basis of functions with adjustable non-linear parameters. We show how to solve directly for the expansion coefficients and Lagrange multipliers and present an iterative method to optimize the non-linear parameters. Example products from the Dunning cc-pVTZ basis set are discussed.

Avoiding Negligible Shell Pairs and Quartets in Electronic Structure Calculations.

We define a significant shell pair in an electronic structure calculation as one that generates at least one two-electron integral larger than a preset threshold. We define a significant shell quartet similarly. We then explore several methods for identifying nonsignificant pairs and quartets so that they can be avoided and computational efficiency improved. We find that the widely used Cauchy-Schwarz bound identifies most nonsignificant quartets but that the Hölder bound is slightly more powerful for identifying nonsignificant pairs.

DFT exchange: sharing perspectives on the workhorse of quantum chemistry and materials science.

In this paper, the history, present status, and future of density-functional theory (DFT) is informally reviewed and discussed by 70 workers in the field, including molecular scientists, materials scientists, method developers and practitioners. The format of the paper is that of a roundtable discussion, in which the participants express and exchange views on DFT in the form of 302 individual contributions, formulated as responses to a preset list of 26 questions. Supported by a bibliography of 777 entries, the paper represents a broad snapshot of DFT, anno 2022.

Q-MP2-OS: Møller-Plesset Correlation Energy by Quadrature.

We present a quadrature-based algorithm for computing the opposite-spin component of the MP2 correlation energy which scales quadratically with basis set size and is well-suited to large-scale parallelization. The key ideas, which are rooted in the earlier work of Hirata and co-workers, are to abandon all two-electron integrals, recast the energy as a seven-dimensional integral, approximate that integral by quadrature, and employ a cutoff strategy to minimize the number of intermediate quantities. We discuss our implementation in detail and show that it parallelizes almost perfectly on 840 cores for cyclosporine (a molecule with roughly 200 atoms), exhibits [Formula: see text] scaling for a sequence of polyglycines, and is principally limited by the accuracy of its quadrature.

Assessment of DFT Methods for Transition Metals with the TMC151 Compilation of Data Sets and Comparison with Accuracies for Main-Group Chemistry.

In the present study, we have gathered a collection (that we term TMC151) of accurate reference data for transition-metal reactions for the assessment of quantum chemistry methods. It comprises diatomic dissociation energies and reaction energies and barriers for prototypical transition-metal reactions. Our assessment of a diverse range of different types of DFT methods shows that the most accurate functionals include ωB97M-V, ωB97X-V, MN15, and B97M-rV. Notably, they have also been previously validated to be highly robust for main-group chemistry. Nevertheless, even these methods show substantially worse accuracies for transition metals than for main-group chemistry. For less accurate methods, there is not a good correlation between their accuracies for main-group and transition-metal chemistries. Thus, in the development of new DFT, it is important to assess the accuracies for both types of data. In this regard, we have formulated the TMC34 model for efficient assessment of the performance for transition metals, which complements our previously developed MG8 model for main-group chemistry. Together, they provide a cost-effective means for initial assessment of new methodologies.

Efficient Method for Calculating Effective Core Potential Integrals.

Effective core potential (ECP) integrals are among the most difficult one-electron integrals to calculate due to the projection operators. The radial part of these operators may include r0, r-1, and r-2 terms. For the r0 terms, we exploit a simple analytic expression for the fundamental projected integral to derive new recurrence relations and upper bounds for ECP integrals. For the r-1 and r-2 terms, we present a reconstruction method that replaces these terms by a sum of r0 terms and show that the resulting errors are chemically insignificant for a range of molecular properties. The new algorithm is available in Q-Chem 5.0 and is significantly faster than the ECP implementations in Q-Chem 4.4, GAMESS (US) and Dalton 2016.

Simple Models for Difficult Electronic Excitations.

We present a single-determinant approach to three challenging topics in the chemistry of excited states: double excitations, charge-transfer states, and conical intersections. The results are obtained by using the Initial Maximum Overlap Method (IMOM) which is a modified version of the Maximum Overlap Method (MOM). The new algorithm converges better than the original, especially for these difficult problems. By considering several case studies, we show that a single-determinant framework provides a simple and accurate alternative for modeling excited states in cases where other low-cost methods, such as CIS and TD-DFT, either perform poorly or fail completely.

Excitation Number: Characterizing Multiply Excited States.

How many electrons are excited in an electronic transition? In this Letter, we introduce the excitation number η to answer this question when the initial and final states are each modeled by a single-determinant wave function. We show that calculated η values lie close to positive integers, leading to unambiguous assignments of the number of excited electrons. This contrasts with previous definitions of excitation quantities which can lead to mis-assignments. We consider several examples where η provides improved excited-state characterizations.

Molecular electronic structure in one-dimensional Coulomb systems.

Following two recent papers [Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2015, 17, 3196; Mol. Phys., 2015, 113, 1843], we perform a larger-scale study of chemical structure in one dimension (1D). We identify a wide, and occasionally surprising, variety of stable 1D compounds (from diatomics to tetra-atomics) as well as a small collection of stable polymeric structures. We define the exclusion potential, a 1D analogue of the electrostatic potential, and show that it can be used to rationalise the nature of bonding within molecules. This allows us to construct a small set of simple rules which can predict whether a putative 1D molecule should be stable.

Two-Electron Integrals over Gaussian Geminals.

The evaluation of contracted two-electron integrals over a Gaussian geminal operator is pivotal to diverse quantum chemistry methods. In this article, using the unique factorization properties and the sparsity of these integrals, a novel, near-optimal computation algorithm is presented. Our method employs a combination of recently developed upper bounds, recurrence relations in the spirit of the Head-Gordon-Pople approach, and late- and early-contraction paths in the PRISM style. A detailed study of the FLOP (floating-point operations) cost reveals that the new algorithm is computationally much cheaper than any other previous scheme.

Many-Electron Integrals over Gaussian Basis Functions. I. Recurrence Relations for Three-Electron Integrals.

Explicitly correlated F12 methods are becoming the first choice for high-accuracy molecular orbital calculations and can often achieve chemical accuracy with relatively small Gaussian basis sets. In most calculations, the many three- and four-electron integrals that formally appear in the theory are avoided through judicious use of resolutions of the identity (RI). However, for the intrinsic accuracy of the F12 wave function to not be jeopardized, the associated RI auxiliary basis set must be large. Here, inspired by the Head-Gordon-Pople and PRISM algorithms for two-electron integrals, we present an algorithm to directly compute three-electron integrals over Gaussian basis functions and a very general class of three-electron operators without invoking RI approximations. A general methodology to derive vertical, transfer, and horizontal recurrence relations is also presented.

Communication: Three-electron coalescence points in two and three dimensions.

The form of the wave function at three-electron coalescence points is examined for several spin states using an alternative method to the usual Fock expansion. We find that, in two- and three-dimensional systems, the non-analytical nature of the wave function is characterized by the appearance of logarithmic terms, reminiscent of those that appear as both electrons approach the nucleus of the helium atom. The explicit form of these singularities is given in terms of the interelectronic distances for a doublet and two quartet states of three electrons in a harmonic well.

MP2[V]--A Simple Approximation to Second-Order Møller-Plesset Perturbation Theory.

We propose a simplified variant of the dual-basis MP2[K] scheme [ J. Chem. Phys. 2011, 134, 081103] that bootstraps a small-basis MP2 result to a large-basis one. This simplified method, which we call MP2[V], assumes the occupied orbitals are adequately described by the smaller basis, and, therefore, only the relaxation of the virtual orbitals is considered when shifting to the larger basis. Numerical tests on several organic reactions and noncovalent interactions show that MP2[V] yields absolute and relative energies that are in excellent agreement with the conventional large-basis MP2 calculations but in a small fraction of the time.

Uniform electron gases. III. Low-density gases on three-dimensional spheres.

By combining variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and complete-basis-set limit Hartree-Fock (HF) calculations, we have obtained near-exact correlation energies for low-density same-spin electrons on a three-dimensional sphere (3-sphere), i.e., the surface of a four-dimensional ball. In the VMC calculations, we compare the efficacies of two types of one-electron basis functions for these strongly correlated systems and analyze the energy convergence with respect to the quality of the Jastrow factor. The HF calculations employ spherical Gaussian functions (SGFs) which are the curved-space analogs of Cartesian Gaussian functions. At low densities, the electrons become relatively localized into Wigner crystals, and the natural SGF centers are found by solving the Thomson problem (i.e., the minimum-energy arrangement of n point charges) on the 3-sphere for various values of n. We have found 11 special values of n whose Thomson sites are equivalent. Three of these are the vertices of four-dimensional Platonic solids - the hyper-tetrahedron (n = 5), the hyper-octahedron (n = 8), and the 24-cell (n = 24) - and a fourth is a highly symmetric structure (n = 13) which has not previously been reported. By calculating the harmonic frequencies of the electrons around their equilibrium positions, we also find the first-order vibrational corrections to the Thomson energy.

Chemistry in one dimension.

We report benchmark results for one-dimensional (1D) atomic and molecular systems interacting via the Coulomb operator |x|(-1). Using various wavefunction-type approaches, such as Hartree-Fock theory, second- and third-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory and explicitly correlated calculations, we study the ground state of atoms with up to ten electrons as well as small diatomic and triatomic molecules containing up to two electrons. A detailed analysis of the 1D helium-like ions is given and the expression of the high-density correlation energy is reported. We report the total energies, ionization energies, electron affinities and other physical properties of the many-electron 1D atoms and, using these results, we construct the 1D analog of Mendeleev's periodic table. We find that the 1D periodic table contains only two groups: the alkali metals and the noble gases. We also calculate the dissociation curves of several 1D diatomics and study the chemical bond in H2(+), HeH(2+), He2(3+), H2, HeH(+) and He2(2+). We find that, unlike their 3D counterparts, 1D molecules are primarily bound by one-electron bonds. Finally, we study the chemistry of H3(+) and we discuss the stability of the 1D polymer resulting from an infinite chain of hydrogen atoms.

Communication: Hartree-Fock description of excited states of H2.

Hartree-Fock (HF) theory is most often applied to study the electronic ground states of molecular systems. However, with the advent of numerical techniques for locating higher solutions of the self-consistent field equations, it is now possible to examine the extent to which such mean-field solutions are useful approximations to electronic excited states. In this Communication, we use the maximum overlap method to locate 11 low-energy solutions of the HF equation for the H2 molecule and we find that, with only one exception, these yield surprisingly accurate models for the low-lying excited states of this molecule. This finding suggests that the HF solutions could be useful first-order approximations for correlated excited state wavefunctions.

Uniform electron gases. II. The generalized local density approximation in one dimension.

We introduce a generalization (gLDA) of the traditional Local Density Approximation (LDA) within density functional theory. The gLDA uses both the one-electron Seitz radius rs and a two-electron hole curvature parameter η at each point in space. The gLDA reduces to the LDA when applied to the infinite homogeneous electron gas but, unlike the LDA, it is also exact for finite uniform electron gases on spheres. We present an explicit gLDA functional for the correlation energy of electrons that are confined to a one-dimensional space and compare its accuracy with LDA, second- and third-order Møller-Plesset perturbation energies, and exact calculations for a variety of inhomogeneous systems.

Mixed Ramp-Gaussian Basis Sets.

We discuss molecular orbital basis sets that contain both Gaussian and polynomial (ramp) functions. We show that, by modeling ramp-Gaussian products as sums of ramps, all of the required one- and two-electron integrals can be computed quickly and accurately. To illustrate our approach, we construct R-31+G, a mixed ramp-Gaussian basis in which the core basis functions of the 6-31+G basis are replaced by ramps. By performing self-consistent Hartree-Fock calculations, we show that the thermochemical predictions of R-31+G and 6-31+G are similar but the former has the potential to be significantly faster.